Earth's Stress Change Database download

2017-11-05

Apart from tectonic causes, stress changes on the Earth could also be caused by many external forces. This is a preliminary database of the loading-induced stress changes on the Earth from 2003 to 2014, by considering five external forces that would generate stress changes on the Earth: hydrological loading, atmospheric pressure, ocean tides, solid Earth tides and postglacial rebound (PGR). The five loading forces are quantified using the terrestrial water storage (TWS) inferred from GRACE solutions, the ECMWF surface atmospheric pressure model, the TPXO 7.2 ocean tide solutions, tidal forces computed by the SPOTL package, and the ICE-5G glacial history model. The loading masses are assumed to distribute within a thin layer (relative to the Earth’s radius) on the Earth’s surface, and are used to calculate the Earth’s stress responses through a spherical spectral method. Based on the different time scales of the loading forces, an incompressible viscoelastic Earth model is adopted for PGR and a compressible elastic one is adopted for the other forces.

Please refer to the article in the reference list for more details about the methods and the parameters used in the stress calculation.